Taste is such a subjective matter that we don’t usually conduct preference tests for food. The most you can say about anyone’s preference is that it's one person’s opinion. But because the two big cola companies-Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola are marketed so ag¬gressively, we have wondered how big a role taste preference actually plays in brand loy¬alty. We set up a taste test that challenged people who identified themselves as either Coca-Cola Classic (传统型) or Pepsi fans: find your brand in a blind tasting.
We invited staff volunteers who had a strong liking for either Coca-Cola Classic or Pepsi, Diet (低糖的) Coke, or Diet Pepsi. These were people who thought they'd have no trouble telling their brand from the other brand.
We eventually located 19 regular cola drinkers and 27 diet cola drinkers. Then we fed them four unidentified samples of cola one at a time, regular colas for the one group, diet versions for the other. We asked them to tell us whether each sample was Coke or Pepsi, then we analyzed the records statistically to compare the participants' choices with what mere guesswork could have accomplished.
Getting all four samples right was a tough test, but not too tough, we thought, for people who believed they could recognize their brand. In the end, only 7 out of 19 regu¬lar cola drinkers correctly identified their brand of choice in all four trials. The diet-cola drinkers did a little worse only 7 of 27 identified all four samples correctly.
While both groups did better than chance would predict, nearly half the participants in each group made the wrong choice two or more times. Two people got all four sam¬ples wrong. Overall, half of the participants did about as well on the last round of tas¬ting as on the first, so fatigue (疲劳), or taste burnout, was not a factor. Our preference test results suggest that only a few Pepsi participants and Coke fans may really be able to tell their favorite brand by taste and price.